|
there have been polls the results of which were to me incomprehensible---the percentages that approved of the iraq debacle at the height of the co-ordinated manufacture of consent for example. i remember thinking: perhaps ap was calling people in rural texas...
but it's obvious: a poll is a kind of snapshot. nothing more. there seems to have been a slippage over the past decade or so as the united states has slid more and more into a soft authoritarian system of self-domination that polls indicate something like a functioning democratic system, as if the results of phonebank people calling up a sample of 1200 which has bee statistically determined to represent everybody is like having actual power. whaddya think, whaddya think: you like skippy? crunchy or smooth? aint america grand?
i connect these numbers to the past few weeks of flirtation with racism on the part of the right over this fictional "ground zero mosque" which in turn connects to the wider flirtation with racism, sometimes surrounded with plausible deniability, that has been the tea-party, which have in common this loopy construction of an "us" which is "real amuricans" and a "them" which is Other....if "real amuricans" are white and protestant, then...it's not that hard to figure out.
i'm not sure that this results speaks to idiocy. i can speak to a whole lot of things beyond that, not many of them great as indicators of political well-being.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|